Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most interesting and debated people of our generation. He started Facebook at 19 and, even though people called him baby-faced and inexperienced, he proceeded to build a multi-billion dollar empire in his early twenties. Facebook going public in 2012 made Zuckerberg the twenty-ninth richest person in the world and yet he wears hoodies and for a long time he slept on a bare mattress in a tiny apartment. Some call him ruthless and yet he contributed funds to one of his proclaimed competitors Diaspora because he believes in building an open and transparent world. People said he is in it for the money, yet he walked away from a billion dollar buy-out offer and gave away $500 million in shares to charity.

“Find that thing you are super passionate about. A lot of founding principles of Facebook are that if people have access to more information and are more connected, it will make the world better; people will have more understanding, more empathy. That’s the guiding principle for me. On hard days, I really just step back, and that’s the thing that keeps me going.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“So many businesses get worried about looking like they might make a mistake, they become afraid to take any risk. Companies are set up so that people judge each other on failure. I am not going to get fired if we have a bad year. Or a bad five years. I don’t have to worry about making things look good if they’re not. I can actually set up the company to create value.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“The question I ask myself like almost every day is, ‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?’ . . . Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time. And that’s what this company is.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“I know it sounds corny, but I’d love to improve people’s lives, especially socially… Making the world more open is not an overnight thing. It’s a ten-to-fifteen-year thing.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“I’m here to build something for the long-term. Anything else is a distraction.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television—by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it—often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo… There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: ‘Code wins arguments.’” – Mark Zuckerberg

“I think as a company, if you can get those two things right—having a clear direction on what you are trying to do and bringing in great people who can execute on the stuff—then you can do pretty well.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“We look for people who are passionate about something. In a way, it almost doesn’t matter what you’re passionate about. What we really look for when we’re interviewing people is what they’ve shown an initiative to do on their own.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“I believe that over time people get remembered for what they build, and if you build something great, people don’t care about what someone says about you in a movie . . . they care about what you build.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“[Facebook] is shaping a broader web. If you look back for the past five or seven years, the story about social networking has really been about getting people connected… But if you look forward for the next five years, I think that the story people are going to remember five years from now isn’t how this one site was built; it is how every single service that you use is now going to be better with your friends.” – Mark Zuckerberg

“Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.” – Mark Zuckerberg

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About Author

A passionate marketer, I write and speak on topics of leadership, business culture, and marketing innovation. After spending over 10 years as an integrated marketer and social media leader at Intel and Accenture, I was a co-founder and CMO of BRANDERATI (acquired by Sprinklr in 2014). I am an author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller "Think Like Zuck" and "The Power of Visual Storytelling." I am an avid evangelist of holistic consumer experience management. Chocolate, fashion, and a good book are my vices.